The Orange
(with a Kandy Kim fly-by)

Ah, Hell. We had more fun in a week than those weenies had in a lifetime.

—Florence “Pancho” Barnes

Here we pause to note that the hero of our next story, Colonel Charlie “Chance” Rashad, United States Air Force (retired) only told his tale three times. The first time he told it was to his wife, Lynnette, who took it as though it was the most natural thing in the world and actually thought it was pretty neat. The second time was when he told their daughters. Monica, who would grow up to be an astronomer and an associate professor at Cal Tech, was not particularly impressed. Chelsea, on the other hand, said her dad’s stories were one of the main reasons she became a fighter pilot herself.

The third telling was a little more involved. Chance retired from the Air Force a Colonel at the age of fifty-three. He could have gone for General but there was no flying in it. Hell, there’d barely been enough flying in Colonel to keep him interested. In their retirement years he and Lynnette did a lot of flying and a lot of camping and fishing. They went mostly to Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana but they also took trips to British Columbia and Alaska. One of their favorite stops in Alaska was the town of Yakutat on the Kenai Peninsula. They’d always stay a couple nights at the Yakutat Inn, a hotel, bar, and diner situated on a corner of the field at Yakutat Airport a stone’s throw from Monti Bay. No one could recall who built the two-story log cabin with a little porch in front where you could have a beer and watch airplanes (or more accurately look at airplanes, since Yakutat Airport isn’t exactly JFK) and a deck in the back where you could watch the waves crash on the rocks in the bay and hear the gulf wind rustle the pines. If you’re lucky you’ll spot a pod of orca, and if you’re especially fortunate a herd of humpback whales migrating like the sea itself. The inn’s origins were mysterious, but outside the king salmon in Kodiak there’s no better place to hear flying stories. As a result, one of Chance and Lynette’s nights at the Inn invariably culminated in a Bacchanalia of storytelling, drinking, and shooting pool with local fishermen, bush pilots, and barflies.

One night last spring the regulars (among whom Chance and Lynette came to count themselves) were joined by a pair of oddly dressed fellows who both stood more than six-six and looked like brothers, the only difference being that one had a bushy red beard with a few strands of white in it and the other had a bushy gray beard with a few strands of red remaining. They looked like lumberjacks but it turned out they were brother pilots and writers. They were hail-fellows-well-met and within an hour everyone was delightfully drunk and an expert pool shot.

Stories were swapped, several tall tales grew a couple inches, and eventually the conversation came around to the strangers—whose names were Filnik and Borse, or Red Beard and White Beard depending on how many drinks you’d had—and how they’d come to be in Yakutat.

The fellows told stories about Kandy Kim along with a few other stories about airplanes behaving in mysterious and possibly supernatural ways. They inquired about Derringer Bill to no avail. Chance and several of the bush pilots had heard of Kandy Kim, but until that night at the Yakutat Inn they’d assumed the stories were legends. When Filnik and Borse confirmed she was in fact quite real seven of the bush pilots, along with a retired Delta Airlines 747 captain named Trent Wilcox, volunteered on the spot to help with the reclamation. Captain Wilcox and four of the bush pilots were sober enough the following morning to join the fellows on the glacier. Captain Wilcox and two of them later became full fellows, the first Americans to gain the distinction. The honors were bestowed in a complex and wonderfully dangerous wing-walking ceremony over the Labrador Coast.

That night at the Yakutat Inn it might have been the booze or the cast of characters, it might have been the camaraderie or the fact that Chance and Lynette were 2,000 miles from home in an Alaskan saloon with a bunch of bush pilots and a wayward jumbo jet captain. Whatever the reason, the more Chance talked to Filnik and Borse the more he realized, the more he knew in his very soul, that they needed to hear his tale. It was a flying story but he believed it had a deeper significance. For the first time he was in the company of people who maybe could help him find it.

The evening had started with ale and games of Nine-Ball, progressed to gin and Eight-Ball, then reached a crescendo during the Ballad of Kandy Kim with bourbon and Snooker. By the time the Ballad was done a sort of benevolent calm had descended upon the room, and upon Chance and Lynette and the fellows, and the barkeep, and the dozen other pilots and barflies. They heard waves crashing on the rocks and the big Alaska wind in the trees. Outside the front window the three-quarter moon made the planes on the ramp glow. The barkeep walked to the fireplace and lit a small blaze more for ambiance than warmth. There were contented sighs. It was the kind of night that called for a fire.

When everyone had had some time alone with their thoughts, Chance got up and ordered a round of India Pale Ales for the room and handed the barkeep some money. The barkeep made some change and handed back to him a larger amount than Chance had started off with. Chance took a few more bills out of his pocket, slapped the entire amount on the bar and said with a slight slur, And there’s a little somepin’ extra for you.

The transaction thus consummated and the ales passed ’round, Chance leaned against the fireplace mantle beneath a big wood-framed black-and-white of a Cessna 185 float plane flying past Denali. He figured standing gave him a better shot of making it through his story without passing out, which was becoming a decided possibility. But he also knew his story would keep everyone else wide, wide awake.

Chance tapped his glass with his Air Force Academy ring and the room fell quiet. He said, I’ve never seen an airplane fly itself, less’n you count drones—and dammit, I do not count drones. There were a few good-natured Here, here’s!

Chance continued, I never saw one, but I heard stories along those lines during my career and I never had reason to doubt ’em. In fact, part of me kind of clung to them, if you know what I mean. But I’ve never heard anything quite like that ballad you just wove for us. Thank you. He raised his bottle, To Kandy Kim!

The room boomed, To Kandy Kim!

Bottles and glasses were clinked, huzzahs exchanged. There were handshakes and fist bumps. Someone put some money in the jukebox and played a song called “The Pilot” by a singer (who happened to be a fellow, but the fellows kept that to themselves) who called himself the White Buffalo.

When the song ended, Chance continued. I haven’t seen an airplane fly itself, but I’ve seen something I couldn’t explain. It’s how I know every word of your story about Kandy Kim is true. I know you fellows will enjoy hearing what happened over the Mojave Desert in 1983. That was the first time it happened, anyway, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Now listen here…

d

Sure enough the room hung on his every word and peppered him with questions when he was through. Filnik in particular loved Chance’s story. He kept slapping his knee and punching his brother in the shoulder and shouting, Yes, yes, of course! He pounded the table so hard it cracked down the middle. You can see the cracked table to this day if you’re ever in the Yakutat Inn.

When Chance was done with his story both Filnik and Borse were weeping. Not because it was a sad story, but because it moved them to their cores. The fellows are like that. A good story well told, much less one about airplanes, is something akin to a religious experience for them. Besides, they’re a pretty emotional bunch to begin with. The fact that this Colonel was favoring them with one after keeping it within his family so long made it that much more special, like a bottle of fine wine that’s been aging in the cellar awaiting the perfect occasion to be opened and shared.

Which is an apt simile, because ever since the night when Filnik and Borse happened to be in the Yakutat Inn at the same time as a retired Air Force Colonel named Chance and everyone got drunker than they thought humanly possible, it’s been a tradition to quaff round after round and retell their stories. As you might have guessed, the stories don’t change much. Even the chattiest pilots, the ones who can’t resist cracking bad jokes on the radio when they’re stacked up over O’Hare, fall into a sort of reverent silence the first time they hear the stories.

Which is one of the magical aspects of aviation: hallowed ground is everywhere, places where great pilots have lived and flown and told their tales. Some of those places are obvious, like Kitty Hawk or the ruins of Pancho Barnes’ Happy Bottom Riding Club near Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert. Others, like the saloon at the Yakutat Inn where Chance Rashad and Filnik and Borse first told their stories, where bush pilots have spun yarns for damn near one hundred years, are hidden. People fly in search of them. In fact that search is the reason a lot of pilots became pilots in the first place.

Incidentally, the story of the giant orange is also, in a roundabout way, how the Ballad of Kandy Kim found its way to us, and how this little volume of flying stories came to be in your hands.

d

The first time Colonel Charlie “Chance” Rashad saw it he was still in flight school. He was two weeks from graduation and flying a routine navigation exercise over the China Lake Weapons Range in the Mojave Desert on a July morning in 1983. He was part of a four-ship flight of T-38 Talon advanced trainers. The Talon is a supersonic, twin-engine bullet that’s essentially a stripped-down jet fighter. The day’s mission was a combat navigation practice in which he would separate from his wingmen and shut off his avionics and radios to simulate a failure. The objective was to use visual aids to get back to his squadron and get back home.

He started off in formation at 32,000 feet at 0800 hours. The instructor, Major Sam “Trigger” Tillwell, called, OK, Arc Light Three, break. Arc Light flight, turn left heading one-one-zero, follow my lead. ’Luck, Arc Light Three.

Chance toggled his mic. Arc Light Three, on the break. See you at happy hour.

Chance kicked his Talon into a five-g break and dove for the ground at 450 knots. His squadron mates streaked away in a flash of silver at a combined 800 knots.

Not that Chance was watching.

He focused on the desert floor rushing at him. The azure of 32,000 feet gave way to the pale blue of the sea level morning. He leveled off at 500 feet and the earth righted itself. The plane had hair trigger controls, Chance took a deep breath and it breathed with him. Chance banked steep left around a bald hilltop and a cluster of joshua trees blurred past a hundred feet from his helmet. He reversed the turn, firewalled the throttles, and punched the plane out to the middle of the desert.

Chance had a habit of singing while he flew. It was an unconscious habit and the songs usually related to whatever he was doing. Flying over the desert at near the speed of sound, he hummed Billy Joel’s “The Ballad of Billy the Kid.”

Well, he never traveled heavy

Yes, he always rode alone

And he soon put many older guns to shame...

He was humming the bridge when one of the controllers back at Edwards, simulating the role of the E-3 AWACS command plane, called, Arc Light flight, Arc Light flight, this is Grand Central. We’ve lost radio and radar contact with Arc Light Three. Advise, over.

That was the signal for Chance to shut off his radios and avionics. He flipped the switches and his screen and earphones went dead. He was now flying blind. And he loved it. In an era when every square foot of earth had been mapped, when airspace was monitored by radar and the new satellite global positioning systems and linked by a billion devices, where flying was increasingly a matter of autopilots, computers, checklists, protocols, and paperwork, pilots flew for the few minutes every once in a blue moon when it would be just them and the machine. In Chance’s case, he had a few minutes alone with a supersonic Air Force trainer.

While the rest of Arc Light flight maneuvered to their start place on the other side of the desert, Chance lit the Talon’s afterburners and flipped inverted. Just because. The desert floor zoomed over his head 500 feet below. At the crest of a sandstone arroyo he stood the plane on its right wing, pulled his power and dove into a canyon at 350 knots.

This was Mach Canyon, a twelve-mile-long, quarter-mile-wide, and half-mile-deep natural sandstone drag strip for fighter pilots. At the eight-mile point the canyon doglegged to the south. The 2,000-foot wall at the turn was called the Ramp. In violation of about one hundred regulations fliers played chicken with the Ramp, and there were even a few black marks across its face from particularly close runs by F-15, F-16, and T-38 pilots. Airplane junkies set up campsites on the rim above the Ramp and filmed the planes.

Chance pushed the Talon fifty feet closer to the canyon floor, low enough that he could see individual spikes on the joshua trees. Over his shoulder his airplane’s shadow kept formation on the canyon wall.

The trick to the Ramp was the skid. You approached high enough and slow enough to safely make the six-g turn but low enough and fast enough to tag the Ramp. Tricky enough in a Viper with 30,000 pounds of thrust or an Eagle with twice that, carrying no weapons and with half tanks. The Talon was a high-performance jet but it maxed out at 9,000 pounds of thrust and when you pulled more than seven g’s you were on your own, pal.

But the plane felt good today, so Chance set himself up for the run. Out of the corner of one eye he saw tents, tripods, and people on the ridge. He was singing louder.

Well, he robbed his way from Utah to Oklahoma

And the law just could not seem to track him down.

And it served his legend well,

For the folks, they loved to tell,

’Bout when Billy the Kid came to town…

Two thousand feet from the Ramp he pointed the nose at the horizon, let eighty knots bleed off his airspeed then lit his afterburners and pulled the plane into a perfect 70-degree right turn. The HUD said 7.2g’s and he held it there for a few seconds until he felt the buffeting of ground effect from the face of the Ramp. He eased off the turn, pushed the nose down, and leveled off with a precise snap at 400 feet AGL and 290 knots, increasing quickly, down the last four miles of Mach Canyon. He looked over his shoulder and saw people waving and jumping.

He shouted out loud, Whoo-haah! I love this shit!

As he started to climb he hummed Fly Me to the Moon. Checked the clock, they’d be in position in ninety seconds. And here I be, he thought, ahead of schedule as per. He climbed out of the canyon and glanced at the avionics out checklist. He pretended to cycle the systems, going through the procedure with his gloved hand. OK, no dice, time for a little dead reckoning. He hummed the second verse and started an ascending left turn to set up the—

Which is when he noticed he had a wingman. Or rather, a wing-something. It was an orange. Not literally an orange, but an orange was the only earthly thing Chance could think of. About five times the size of his Talon, it was keeping pace with his jet as if it was the most natural thing in the world. He couldn’t see any canopy or windows, in fact he could not make out any flight surfaces at all. It was—well, it was a giant flying orange.

He flipped the dark sun visor down on his helmet. For some reason it made him feel better, like a kid who knows his Star Wars sheets will protect him from the monsters under his bed. Which was an apt analogy, because the giant orange flying next to his jet on an otherwise beautiful day in the desert pretty well reduced him to childlike mental processes. It happens to all of us at one time or another, when something happens that’s so big we just sort of revert to the fundamentals. In Chance’s case, the fundamentals involved keeping a jet in the air. He kept singing, consciously now, to calm himself.

Fill my heart with song,

And let me sing forevermore.

You are all I long for,

All I worship, and adore.

In other words, what the fuck?

In other words, WHAT THE FUCK?!

They’d climbed to 5,000 feet and leveled off. Chance gently brought the Talon into a shallow right turn (again, like the kid under the blanket who when his arm falls asleep shifts very, very slowly so’s not to wake the monsters). The orange followed along, and as they turned it started to bob up and down next to him. It did it slowly at first, increasing until it was a blur. After a few seconds it stopped bobbing and hung in space off his wing.

Something (he would never be able to say what that something was) told him the orange expected him to mirror its maneuver. Chance said to the cockpit, Why not? I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

He repeated the maneuver, somewhere in the back of his addled mind enjoying the rollercoaster effect of positive and negative g’s in the light, nimble aircraft. After a dozen or so, he returned to the turn. Which, he realized, was now a formation maneuver.

After they mirrored the bobbing maneuver, the giant orange performed the first of many maneuvers Chance would never be able to explain. It zipped out in front of him, accelerating from 320 knots to what he figured was somewhere in the vicinity of light speed, stopped dead, then shot to the right across his flight path, turned 90 degrees again and shot past him on the right. He looked over his shoulder and saw the orange repeat the maneuver behind him, and a half-second later it resumed its position off his left wing, bobbing contentedly.

So the giant orange wanted a flying contest. Chance actually shrugged. He shook his head and said, I’m afraid this isn’t going to be too impressive compared to your nine hundred g maneuvers there. But here goes.

He barrel rolled right, then barrel rolled left. The orange bobbed. He snap-rolled left, and snap-rolled right. The orange bobbed a little more. He lit the ’burners and flew a high-performance (relatively-speaking) loop, then an inverted loop. The orange bobbed more quickly.

Then it streaked away. It zipped ahead at mach insanity as before, paused, then shot straight into the sky and was gone. Chance checked the clock. The whole incident had lasted less than ninety seconds. He shook his head a couple times, brought the Talon level at 5,000, and restarted his exercise checklist.

Chance didn’t mention the orange at happy hour, and left it out of his post-flight debrief and report.

Chance saw the orange from time to time over the years. He graduated at the top of his class and became an F-15 driver, first in Nevada, then Alaska, and later in Germany and the Middle East. He flew in both gulf wars.

The second time he saw the orange he was on a ferry flight from Nellis Air Force Base to Reykjavik, Iceland, for an annual NATO exercise. The biggest challenges on the flight were staying awake and figuring out different ways to keep your ass cheeks from falling asleep. Nine fighters were stretched out in a loose formation over a mile. Icebergs spiked the blue north Atlantic and the flight slipped in and out of clouds.

He was puttering with a nav control when the orange appeared off his right wing. It bobbed hello. As if he’d learned it in flight school (which he kind of did, he reflected) he bobbed back. This time it performed the maneuvers he had done five years ago in the Talon. Only this time Chance couldn’t do anything remotely like them. He was slinging three 610 USGAL external tanks under his belly and wings, and another 850 gallons on each side of his fuselage in conformal fuel tanks. Ferry configuration, otherwise known as the flying elephant. Plus he didn’t have the extra fuel for afterburners. The orange finished the maneuvers, and then bobbed off his right wing.

Chance did a series of gentle turns, sweeping back and forth in a lazy eight. He inverted, but that was about it. He felt terrible.

The orange repeated his maneuvers, then did them a second time. Then it did the Talon maneuvers again and bobbed off his right wing. He sensed it was impatient. He keyed his mic, Ah, Rosebud flight, Rosebud Two. Anyone else see a kind of orangish thing over in my direction, over?

There were a few snickers from bored pilots, and two wingmen drifted over to look. But as soon as he keyed his mic, the orange shot straight up and disappeared.

No shit, he said into his mask.

His wingman said, Rosebud Two, Rosebud Five, Negative on the orangish-thingy.

Another chimed in, Rosebud Two, Rosebud Seven, Ah, I got some white-ish thingies up here. Anyone else, over?

Rosebud Seven, Rosebud Four, Affirmative on the white-ish thingies. I see some blue stuff, too, over.

Rosebud Seven, Rosebud Five, Ah, I’ve got bluish stuff above me and below me.

Someone who sounded liked Rosebud Lead called theatrically, Everything is wrong. Everything looks strange, even the ocean! It was a quote from Flight 19, the infamous Navy flight that vanished without a trace over the Bermuda Triangle in 1945.

Wiseasses, Chance mused. At least the chatter killed a few minutes.

The next time he saw the orange nearly broke his heart. He was in an F-15E Strike Eagle over Iraq on the first night of the Desert Storm air war. That night, when Iraqi defenses lit up the night sky and turned the air into shrapnel, he was coming off a bombing run when his plane took heavy anti-aircraft fire. It knocked out his left engine, tore into his wing, and wounded his Weapons Systems Officer, his backseater. The wounds weren’t fatal but Lt. Trent “T-bone” Wilcox was in and out of consciousness. The only good news was the 120 mm rounds missed the conformal fuel tank. Another six inches back and Stagecoach 9 would have returned to earth in very small, very hot pieces.

He radioed his Mayday and limped toward Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Before he landed he had to fly over the gulf and jettison his unspent ordinance. You didn’t land a wounded plane with 10,000 pounds of bombs still hanging on it.

As they crossed the shoreline to the Gulf he toggled the intercom. We’ll be on the ground in ten minutes, T-bone. If you can hear me, click your ’com.

Chance breathed a sigh of relief when the intercom clicked three times in his ears. Then T-bone said weakly, Good goddamned flying back there, Chance. We ought to be dead right now.

Thanks, partner. Save your strength. Drink some water if you can.

Roger that. Hey, Chance?

Yeah?

Good goddamned flying, but I’m still gonna kick your ass for getting me shot.

Hey, look on the bright side. Chicks dig Purple Hearts.

Then you should’ve gotten me shot before I got married, asshole.

Chance grinned into his oxygen mask. So long as T-bone had some piss and vinegar left in him he’d be fine. He glanced in the mirror on the canopy and saw that his wizzo’s eyes were closed and he was breathing normally. Chance focused on getting his plane back to base. They’d cleared a lane for him back to Prince Sultan, and when he was five miles out they’d clear the pattern and runways. Piece of cake. He started humming “Hit the Road, Jack” by Ray Charles.

He saw the orange over the Gulf the moment before he hit the pickle and freed the ordinance. Its color was depleted and it didn’t bob or do any impossible maneuvers. It didn’t do much of anything. It hung in space a few hundred feet from Chance’s dying plane. Even through the adrenaline and fear Chance felt a desperate, hopeless sadness. As it flew next to him it became dimmer still, nearly translucent. He could see the fires of Iraq in the distance through it. He watched it a long moment. He said, I’m sorry.

Then it was gone. With everything happening he couldn’t tell if it zipped away as usual or just faded. As he dropped his bombs into the ocean he thought, I wonder how often the universe is this disappointing.

He didn’t see the orange for many years after the war. At the end of his career he was given command of the 51st Air Wing in Honolulu, a kind of thank you gig for outgoing Colonels. Since he didn’t play golf, to relax he sometimes rented a single-engine Beech Bonanza or Piper Malibu at Honolulu International and went island hopping. Sometimes Lynette joined him, sometimes he just went for a $400 hamburger on one of the other islands.

On an October afternoon with a few squalls lined up to the southeast and the sun preparing something extra in the west, Chance took off in a Beech Bonanza A36 from Lanai Airport after an early supper and flew low over the water looking for dolphins, or if he got lucky migrating gray or blue whales.

He overflew a small pod of bottlenose dolphins and banked to go around, pulling the throttle to descend and keeping the nose level to bleed airspeed. He’d just dropped 20 degrees of flaps and trimmed for ninety knots when the orange slid into formation off his right wing. It looked as it had the first two times. If anything, he thought as it pulled level, it looked brighter. This time he bobbed first, and he pushed the Bonanza into a few aggressive (relatively speaking) maneuvers.

When the orange started bobbing he had a thought. He dropped back toward the dolphin pod, slowing down again and dropping full flaps. He entered a slow, low circle at one hundred feet over the water and eighty knots. The orange followed his maneuvers and flight path and they circled above the dolphin pod.

He waited for the orange’s next maneuver, but it remained in formation with him. They flew that way for a while, moving with the cetaceans. The orange drifted out of the turn and descended toward the water. The impossible maneuvers, the mere fact of the orange, paled in comparison to what happened next. It settled onto the surface of the water a bit in front of the dolphin pod. The water glowed orange and red like dye diffusing into the sea. When the dolphins entered the colors they started leaping and breaching into the air. The orange settled into the water until it was half submerged. The dolphins swam under it and leaped into it. They actually swam in it, and for the first time Chance realized the orange wasn’t made of some futuristic space metal after all. It seemed to be pure light, pure energy. Chance found himself humming the theme song from Flipper. He chuckled to himself. Faster than lightning, indeed.

The orange rose from the water and came up next to him one more time. It was brighter than he’d ever seen it, almost too bright to look at directly. It seemed to pulse a little bit this time too. Chance was filled with the greatest sense of peace he’d ever known. He smiled and said to it, Swimming with dolphins is pretty cool, huh? The orange bobbed and shot into the sky. Back in the water the dolphins resumed their course, swimming lazily toward Lanai Island.

As he headed home to Honolulu he wondered if there might be a way to communicate with it. He thought maybe next time he’d try Morse, even a radio call. As the sun settled on the western rim of the Pacific Ocean he realized it was greedy to think like that. The orange is, and for him that’s plenty. It renews his reverence for the sky. He set his course and enjoyed a few precious minutes alone with the plane. Unconsciously, he started singing.

Fly me to the moon,

And let me play among the stars,

Let me see what spring is like

On Jupiter and Mars…